Technical Posts

The Clarive team is pleased to announce the launch of its product release6.8.5. This latest release comes with a range of new features, most notable of these being:

Kanban SLAs

Snapshotting: import snapshot in new systems

Project configuration templates

Tracked assets

New event for send email failure

User suspension

You can download the binaries for the new release at http://clarive.com/software. You will need a support user in order to be able to download the software. Please feel free to contact us by email at [email protected] if you need a user account.

KANBAN SLAs

Clarive allows for the putting in place of SLAs associated with Topic Categories. These help in identifying thresholds exceeded by each Topic in its various lifecycle Statuses.

Kanban provides identification at a glance within each of its rows, including not only the Topic’s situation as shown in its current Status, but also its history.

SNAPSHOTTING: IMPORT SNAPSHOT IN NEW SYSTEM

Henceforth new instances may be created by importing existing ones via a snapshot file taken from a different Clarive instance. This aids in streamlining the configuration process for environments that we may wish to replicate.

The entire system or a selection of components that are of interest may be imported.

PROJECT CONFIGURATION TEMPLATES

Setting variables can get tedious, it often being the case that different Projects can contain the same variables, together with identical values. By grouping project variables in an Environment Template we can streamline Project configuration. We can also use this to set the Environment in which these are available.

This new feature allows the User to create a template containing the variables and values according to Environment, which can be imported within Projects in order to complete their configuration.

TRACKED ASSETS

Files sent to the servers can be checked for issues by activating the configuration tracking option in the Rule service.

In addition, files currently being tracked may be viewed within the Job:

This comes with the option of auditing files, which throws up an error should an issue arise with the file that is to be overwritten.

NEW EVENT: SEND EMAIL FAILURE

Until now it has been impossible to tell for sure whether an email generated by a notification has been sent properly. Clarive has come up with a solution to this problem with the development of a new event, allowing tracking of email send issues.

The event is triggered when the maximum number of failed attempts to re-send the email is reached.

USER SUSPENSION

This new feature allows suspension of active users in the tool, rather than their deletion, which makes it possible to keep hold of details of users no longer using the tool, as well as enabling their reactivation.

User deactivation results in the aforementioned user no longer having access to the tool and also no longer being able to interact with Clarive via his or her API key.

There are many more exciting features coming out this year, so please watch this space!

The Clarive team is very excited to announce the release of Clarive 6.8. Our new release brings a whole set of features and functionalities that take Lean Application Delivery to a new level.

Release Goals

The focus of the 6.8 release series is to improve the quality and intelligence of the delivery pipeline. We’re very committed to solving some of what we consider to be very important issues that impact on the quality and robustness of the DevOps toolchain, namely:

Error prevention, mitigation and guidance

Pipeline quality and completeness

Realtime DevOps debugging

Profiling and bottleneck detection

Root-cause Analysis

Eradicating errors is not just a tongue twister.

Your delivery pipeline is probably comprised of many different tools, technologies and resources. Even the most robust DevOps chains tend to encounter errors along the way, caused by compiler errors, application server issues or resource failures, like simple disk space errors downstream at endpoints in the network.

Clarive 6.8’s new root-cause analysis feature is a powerful tool to help deal with errors that can bring your pipeline to a standstill. Root-cause analysis helps identify why problems/errors happen when they happen:

From admin initiated remediation

From collaboration input

From Clarive’s own curated knowledge base

For example, in the screenshot below, Clarive interpreted an error, giving guidance to the user that “rebase was needed” (a dependency problem was detected in the Git repository prior to deploying the application):

New root-cause configuration items can be configured to parse errors and give guidance on how to respond to errors. Root causes can be also recorded on-the-fly into the knowledge base for future, automatic matching.

DevOps Quality

Even the best DevOps automation has bugs. DevOps is about making it easy to deliver changes continuously with quality and speed. But how robust is your DevOps automation? What if you introduce changes to it that break build and deployment applications. DevOps has become part of the final product. You’ve just bankrupted the business!

Clarive 6.8 brings a pipeline static analysis checker that verifies how strong and resilient your automation is before you make changes. It will also make recommendations that help create more mature and safer logic:

Does it have a rollback procedure?

Did you make it a template or hard-coded variables

Is your pipeline modular or monolithic?

And many more, besides

The static analysis of Clarive rules can be executed from the command-line every time a rule is saved. You can even prevent the rule from being saved if it has errors, helping making the whole system even more secure.

Pipeline Stage Profiling

Create pipeline stages and profile them by stage and operation type:

networking for testing and deploying

remote command profiling

DSL and local script profiling

Repository clone or checkout times

etc.

The stage visualizations can now be seen in the job monitor live. Clarive 6.8 stores historical profiling data so that you can profile the evolution, and prevent and detect bottlenecks ahead of time.

Step-by-Step Debugging

The new step-by-step debugger is one of the best new features coming out in the 6.8 series.

In this version you can watch how the deployment runs step-by-step, with live logs and standard error and output from endpoints, external integrated and orchestrated applications, databases, etc. All the scripts and rule logic executed externally, will be controlled from a single entry point – the Clarive DevOps platform.

Some of the key features of step-by-step debugging coming out in the 6.8 release series:

Breakpoints

Watch variables and stash

Change values before executing (in debug mode)

Repeat and rollback steps

Pause and connect to server from the web interface (!)

Dry-run and mock steps

Additional Enhancements

There many more, over one hundred, enhancements in Clarive 6.8. Here are some of them:

Job log streaming – logs are now streamed from the remote servers through the agents to the browser.

User groups are now part of security scopes

Project-specific pipelines

New scope events

…

Plugins

There are many new plugins that will be covered in another series of posts, so stay tuned. But here are some new important additions and complete makeovers:

SAP

Salesforce

Siebel

Changeman ZMF

Endevor

Coming Up Soon

Clarive feature releases come out every month. The next release will bring important improvements in many areas, including:

DEVOPS AND BIMODAL IT: MYTHS AND TRUTHS

DevOps and Bimodal IT are two terms which have recently come onto the radar in the world of enterprise IT. Confusion surrounding the definition and use of these concepts is rife so we sought to demystify these terms and understand how analysts such as Gartner see them in play over the next few years.

“This is why I often speak about lean application and service delivery when an organization is serious about DevOps. I believe they should look at the following things; first of all, they should look at application delivery from an end-to-end or a holistic perspective and try to orchestrate it like this. It should try to automate whatever can be automated so that one can deliver at a speed of business and that can be ranging from a few times a year or frequently a few times a day or even an hour if really need be.”

“I believe that DevOps is one of the key answers to support a Bimodal IT organization providing of course that it’s implemented properly and supported by the right infrastructure tooling. As we’ve seen DevOps improve the collaboration and communication between development and operations and try to increase the level of automation in order to support the delivery at the speed of business.”

“A good DevOps tool or solution supporting Bimodal IT for me should at least have one of the following characteristics. Firstly, it should allow you to define and automate any discussion topic between development and operations, whether these are called releases, projects, springs, test cases, change requests or defects, you name it. Secondly, it should be able to provide you with dynamic end-to-end insight into status and activity within the delivery process regardless of the mode being used, so that you really get a deep understanding from a customer perspective inside the delivery process.”

The foundation of the configuration managed by Clarive for its delivery pipelines and changesets are stored in its powerful Configuration Database.

Environments and their resources are managed in the Clarive Configuration Database as graphs. Each resource is defined as a Configuration Item (CI). Configuration items belong to Classes (ie. TomcatInstance or a OracleDB classes), and each class may belong to one or more families, such as Database or Middleware families.

Relationships

CIs can be connected to one another through relationships. For instance, an application may depend on a certain DB CI instance when deploying, so there exists a relationship between both.

Here are a sample list of possible relationships among CIs:

A release (topic) may contain require certain infrastructure to be deployed

A changeset contains repository changes, such as Git revisions

An application (itself a CI) may depend on certain microservice CIs

A pipeline rule may depend on Variables (which are CIs)

Variables may have different values depending on which target Environment (another CI) the Variable is being invoked for.

Relationships are created by associating one entity with another, ie. adding a changeset to a release. Clarive also curates the relationships and removes them if one of the CIs is deleted or deprecated.

Visualizations

Relationships may be visualized with any one of the CI Graph representations. These representations may be opened on the fly as properties of a CI (or Topic).

Graphical visualization of the relationship between CIs in Clarive

Application and Service Configuration

Any Clarive Project, which is used to represent applications and services in a organization, can be modeled from available configuration templates using the project configuration editor:

Application models are stored in the Clarive graph database and can then be displayed using the same CI visualizations mentioned above.

Database Release Automation

Implementing a fully automated, continuous application delivery process requires that ALL configuration items, including those that are stored in a database, be version controlled and deployed as part of the full cycle.

Unfortunately, a recent survey showed that many companies which implement continuous delivery for their application code do not do the same for their database code.

Here are some of the database configuration items that Clarive is capable of managing:

1) DDL, schema

2) DB Scripts, Stored-Procedures, Functions and Triggers, such as PL/SQL or Mongo Javascript

3) Application Configuration stored in the Database

Data?

Why is Clarive concerned about managing data? Well, the answer is rather simple: a great number of applications, be it in-house or closed ERP products, store their configuration in the database. Configuration that affects how the application logic and interface behaves. Usually this means inserting or updating a few rows of data from one environment to the next.

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